The story of a black history podcast: From your stories to your headphones
How we made “Historically Black”
“He should no longer be a secret.”
“When I came home from school my dad was always sitting in that den and that photo was always, always there.”
“I pressed play and I felt like I was hearing and seeing a ghost.”
Those are quotes from some of the subjects of the “Historically Black” podcast. The eight-episode mini-series brought to life objects and photographs from black history in America, telling emotional, meaningful and often surprising stories of participants’ treasured family heirlooms, with the voices of hosts Keegan-Michael Key, Issa Rae, Roxane Gay, and Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton narrating the journey.
The podcast was part of a larger experiment in social journalism, bringing together user-generated content and community-building with deep reporting to create a multi-pronged experience that moved between a Tumblr, a podcast and a series of articles.
“Historically Black” began as part of The Washington Post’s coverage of the opening National Museum of African American History and Culture. In the midst of our stellar arts coverage looking at the particulars of the museum — its architecture, its collections, its curators and its artifacts — we also wanted to zoom out. We wanted to use the opportunity of this cultural moment to explore stories of black history beyond what would be featured in the museum.
And we started with a simple question: “What objects make up your experience of black history in America?”
Over the course of three months, we received more than 100 stories from 400 years of history on our Tumblr. People submitted artifacts from the days of slavery, poll tax receipts from the Jim Crow era, diaries from World War II, record collections from the 1970s to today, and tons of beautiful family photos.
We knew we wanted to hear the voices behind these objects, and to delve deeper into the histories they held, so we worked with APM Reports to co-produce a series of audio documentaries — what became the “Historically Black” podcast.
These episodes led us to places we’d never imagined when we began collecting submissions on the Tumblr. Our reporters and APM Reports’ reporters and producers talked to the people connected to each of the items — the mothers, photographers, historians and friends who preserved these items for years, sometimes for generations — and revealed incredible and sometimes unknown stories.
In one episode, a photocopy of a slave’s bill of sale became a journey to find the original document — and opened up an entirely new understanding of the family’s post-slavery history. A photograph of Duchess Harris’s grandmother revealed the story of NASA’s “human computers,” the black women hired as mathematicians and engineers during a labor shortage in World War II who went on to transform aviation and space travel. In another story, three women explored their different experiences with black identity, crafting a unique narrative about what it means to be black in America.
Too often when we engage in social journalism, we keep the participants at arms length, allowing them to submit one comment or photo — maybe collecting a few submissions in a blog post — and not engaging any more deeply with their stories. But with “Historically Black,” we aimed to get beyond that — to ask our readers to share their stories with us and then explore those stories to their fullest.
The rest of this week, we’ll be using Medium to share each of the stories, introducing you to the people behind them and explaining how they came together, so stay tuned.
You can listen to more of “Historically Black” on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and explore our stories below:
- Episode 1: How WWII opened doors for one of the first black women at NASA
- Episode 2: The Million Man March changed history — and it transformed this father’s life
- Episode 3: A hunt for his slave ancestor’s original bill of sale unearthed a surprising history
- Episode 4: He went searching for his roots and found the most popular black fiddler in 1920s Missouri
- Episode 5: In photos of ordinary life, James Van Der Zee captured Harlem Renaissance glamour
- Episode 6: What does it mean to be “black enough?” Three women explore their racial identities.
- Episode 7: Her great-great-grandfather was born a slave. Almost 200 years later, she visited the HBCU he built.
- Episode 8: Why it matters if pop culture tells black love stories
